The "Q" stood for quality and the phrase, when spoken aloud, sounds like "thank you." [2] It was to be a recognition of the best work appearing in Star Trek fanzines. In the first year of the award, there were only two categories: In the "best writer" category, Leslie Fish won for The Weight, which was still being serialized in Warped Space. Connie Faddis won for "best artist" for her body of work in the previous year.

Fan Qs were awarded at various cons for the first few years until 1981, when they were awarded at MediaWest*Con 1, where they've been awarded ever since. In 1982, the first Fan Q awards were given to Star Wars fans.

klangley56 offers her take on what might have led to the creation of the FanQ Awards: "Back in The Day (1974) two ST zine authors, Jackie Lichtenberg and Laura Basta, were nominated in the zine category of the prestigious Hugo Awards. A furor arose in the ranks of SF fandom (part of the ongoing disgruntlement SF fandom felt towards ST fandom at the time). This was one of the factors that led to the creation ... of the FanQ Awards..." [3]

In 1982, the sixth award year, it was announced there would be three genres: Star Trek, Star Wars and Other. In 1987, the form still had only three categories, Star Trek, Star Wars, and General, but the awards themselves ended up being more varied. See: here.

Controversies

At various times, multiple communities of fans felt shut out or minimized from the FanQ nominating and award process. Others felt that the awards where taking themselves too seriously and for a few years organized mock awards that they called the QuanFoo Awards. [5]

In 1981, Lori Chapek-Carlton explained a change in rules in an attempt to bolster the number of people voting: "We're putting in a new regulation this year, for the Fifth Annual Fan Q Awards. In order to insure representative and fair awards, we are going to insist on participation in the nominations and voting. At least one-third of MediaWest*Con membership has to partici pate, otherwise there will be NO AWARDS, gang. Nominations should begin after December 31 and be in by January 31, 1981, so they can be listed in the 2nd Progress Report in February. Anything published in a media fan zine in the calendar year 1980 is eligible. The categories are: Favorite Fanzine, Favorite Short Story, Favorite Long Story, and Favorite Poem. Since all the other categories are judged by the piece(s), Favorite Single Artwork must be judged by the same criteria, and it must be a published piece."[6]

In 1984, K/S fandom began offering their own awards in an effort to offer Star Trek slash writers some recognition: the K/Star Awards. The K/S fans would repeat this effort again in the late 1990s when the Philon Awards began in 1998.

Two years later all of Star Trek fandom began to feel shut out of the Fan Q's, and they started the Surak Awards, given out at a variety of K/S and gen Trek cons. From Boldly Writing: "A couple of odd things happened in the Star Trek category in 1986. First, as reported earlier, Rosalie Blazej and Kin of the Same Womb Born got on the ballot, despite the fact that the story had been published in 1984 and was not eligible. Rosalie and her story were subsequently withdrawn. Second, No Award won for best Star Trek fanzine and best Star Trek poet. (Syn Ferguson won for best Star Trek writer for Courts of Honor, but hers was the only name on the ballot after Rosalie's was withdrawn; and Caren Parnes won for best Star Trek artist.) Kim Dyer, the Fan Q administrator, explained: "'Please make sure your readers know that if the guidelines for keeping a category were in force last year, there would have been NO Star Trek categories'. The Fan Q administrators made some changes because of these events. First, nominees were required to document their year of publication. Second, voters were explicitly informed that "No Award" meant "none of the nominees in this category are worthy of receiving an award." (Apparently many fans voted No Award because they felt they must vote in every category, and if they were not familiar with the category, they checked No Award instead of skipping the category and leaving it blank.) A group of fans responded to the lack of Star Trek nominations in the Fan Qs in a different way. These Star Trek fans created their own award, the Surak Award."

By the early 1990s, more members of the slash fandom community felt that slash fan fiction still wasn't getting the Fan Q recognition it deserved. (Some fans alleged that for years, the Fan Q people simply threw away ballots which voted to nominate slash stories or novels.) In 1992, they started their own parallel award via a separate balloting process, the STIFfie Award which was given out at MediaWest*Con. Although the STIFfie Awards presentation was held annually at MediaWest*Con, they were not in any way affiliated with MediaWest*Con. The STIFfie Awards continued for another 9 years.

Possibly in response to this, in 1993, slash and gen zines were broken out into separate categories for the FanQ awards, and no longer competed against each other for categories like, "Best Zine", "Best Cartoon", etc.

Rogue Nominees and Winners?

Oddly, there is a listing in a Beauty and the Beast newsletter called The Helper's Network Gazette about the 1995 Fan Q award winners in that fandom. It is unknown if these were "official" Fan Q winners or a sub-division run by and recognized only in the Beauty and the Beast fandom. Another anomaly is that the BatB nominees did not have to be published in the previous year, another clue that this may have been some sort of rogue process.

The Splintering of Fandoms

We had 1488 electronic nominations and approximately 300 paper ones. I think we have quite a diversified ballot and I hope you will take part and vote. An online ballot is now available. Paper ballots were mailed to the few people who requested them and sent a SASE. As always, paper ballots can be turned in at my room, if you are passing by, or in the ballot box that is usually in the 'Zine Reading Room. If you see something "missing" from the ballot that you know had three nominations, it probably didn't have the requisite competition and will be given an Honorable Mention. We had many of those this year - I don't have the exact numbers but it is up from last year. As the fandoms keep splintering, there is less and less competition for some groups.

The Fading Print Fanzine Era

In March 2015, one fan inquired whether the FanQ awards would ever embrace online fan fiction:

"I have a question. As years go by, paper zines are getting fewer and fewer, as people retire from zine publishing and no one new comes along to keep the fire burning as it were. In addition, with the rise of social media, tumblr, and digital outlets, it's eventually going to get to the point where there aren't going to be enough zines out there to have a Fan Q around anymore. That said, will the Fan Q ever update and branch out to include artists and writers who publish to online outlets and to fandoms where zine culture hasn't existed because it's too new?"[7]

↑canellfan "....and a couple of other friends (Cathy "Kitty" Woldow and Sally Smith) for two to three years organized a parody of the FanQ Awards, which we called the QuanFoo Awards, and which we promoted and presented during MWC (usually the same night that the FanQ Awards came out. This was a point at which some of the fan writing that was being glorified by the FanQs seemed unbelievably pretentious and stilted, and so we made fun by creating some truly bizarre award categories and gathered quite a few friends to bestow our dishonors onto what we all thought was "overdone" fan writing at the time...The QuanFoo Awards were short-lived and only lasted for the last few years that MediaWest*Con was at its original East Lansing location. Once the convention moved to its current Lansing location, they ended. Source: Savage Says: The Most Dangerous Fan is an Obsessive Fan: Day-to-day drabbles from a teleholic, dated Jan 10, 2010.